Auto racing fans could benefit from trip down ‘Thunder Road’

“He left the road at 90, that’s all there is to say.

The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day.”

– words and music by Robert Mitchum

Tony Villelli knows a lot about racing.

But he’s never seen the big daddy of all racing films, Arthur Ripley’s 1958 offering “Thunder Road.”

No surprise there. Villelli, host of the radio show Speed Sport Report, is only 30 years old. He is, as he says, “a child of the ‘80s.”

In an article that I wrote for this issue of 7 (see page 14), I quote Villelli on various aspects of NASCAR racing. As would be the case of anyone who not only is host of an hour-long show (9 a.m. Saturdays on 790 AM) but who has taken to the track once or twice, Villelli can tell you pretty much anything you need to know about auto racing.

He knows a fabricator from a firewall, a spoiler from a sway bar.

But never to have seen “Thunder Road”?

“Well,” he explains, “I’m of the ‘Days of Thunder’ generation.”

OK, when it comes to portraying stock-car racing, “Days of Thunder,” for all its Hollywood lapses of reality, is a decent racing film. Even Roger Ebert, who characterizes it as the quintessential Tom Cruise picture, gives director Tony Scott credit for creating “racing footage (that) is loud and fast enough to be exciting.”

And there are nice things about the other “light-hearted” racing films that Villelli likes – which, he says, provide him with the quotes that he sprinkles throughout his shows:

“Smokey and the Bandit” (1977; DVD, VHS; 1:36; rated PG): Hal Needham helped make Burt Reynolds into the major box-office star of the early 1980s by directing this story of a modern-day moonshiner named Bo “The Bandit” Darville (Reynolds) who drives circles around the law – mainly Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice – in his Pontiac Trans-Am, trying to draw attention away from his buddy (Jerry Reed) who is driving a truck full of beer from Texas to Georgia. (Trivia: Look for a pre-Oscar Sally Field.)

“Smokey and the Bandit II” (1980; DVD, VHS; 1:40; rated PG): Success breeds sequels, and so Needham brought Reynolds back to play The Bandit again. This time, Bo and his buddy have to drive an elephant across the country in 24 hours with Sheriff Justice chasing him.

“The Cannonball Run” (1981; DVD, VHS; 1:35; rated PG): Needham again, this time directing Reynolds and an ensemble cast that includes Roger Moore, Dean Martin, Jackie Chan, Farrah Fawcett and Sammy Davis Jr. as competitors in an illegal cross-country race.

“Stroker Ace” (1983; DVD, VHS; 1:36; rated PG): And, finally, wearing the formula a bit thin, this Needham comedy has Reynolds portraying a NASCAR driver who never seems to win a race, crashes too often, is forced to wear a chicken suit to promote his new sponsor and who, ultimately, makes good.

Funny films all. None, however, is

“Thunder Road” (DVD, VHS; 1:32; rated PG).

Filmed in and around Asheville, N.C., the bare-bones-budget, black-and-white film is set in Tennessee and involves a good ol’ boy named Lucas Doolin (Mitchum). Just back from the Korean War, Lucas finds that taking over the family moonshine business isn’t going to be as easy as he thought.

On one side are the criminals who want to consolidate the business by forcing free agents such as Lucas out. On the other are the U.S. Treasury agents – or “revenuers” – who want to shut him down.

Carrying Mitchum’s trademark what-have-I-got-to-lose attitude, Lucas drives his souped-up Ford, with its secret 200-gallon tank of illegal liquor, through backwoods roads at speeds that would cause Tony Stewart to lose his lunch.

While Ripley, who was in his early 60s when the film was made, is carried as the director-of-record, speculation is that Mitchum – then just 41 – had at least a hand fashioning the final cut. It was he, in any event, who came up with the story, who served as producer and who wrote and performed the immensely impossible-to-forget title song.

To his credit, Villelli admits that the Reynolds movies on his favorites list are strictly for fun.

“They aren’t quite as in-depth as ‘Days of Thunder,’ ” he says, “or … I’m sorry, what was the name of the one you said?”

It’s called “Thunder Road,” Tony. But all you have to remember is this:

“There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the devil’s thirst,

The law they swore they’d get him, but the devil got him first.”